a broken memory
by fressamour
Summary: She sets the cold coffee down between her feet. Her boots squeak as she moves her legs and rests her elbows on her knees. "My wife..." she waits for a reaction. Usually there is one. "I'm here because my wife...I'm sorry my soon-to-be ex-wife...doesn't remember me. She was in a coma a month ago. She woke up just two weeks ago but she, uh, lost a lot of her memory."
1. and a broken home

There's a large handwritten sign in the front that declares she's made it to her destination. The tall, thin black letters are partly washed away by the pouring rain only ghosting along the cardboard due to the permanent Sharpie that was used to write the words.

Jane has a cup of lukewarm coffee in her hands that probably tastes as bad as it smells. But she drinks it anyway as she opens the large rusted green door to the small center.

There population of the room is colorful by not only contrasting skin tones but also age, height and body shape. She feels a little less nervous when she sees other women of her calibre.

"Welcome," smiles a short stout woman with white hair and eyes bluer than Jane had ever witnessed before.

She blinks a few times when the lady has her hand outstretched to her.

"Are you here for the Partners of Amneisa Victims support group?"

She'd only ever heard of it being P.A.V. so it takes her an embarrassing moment too long to nod. "Yeah, I'm...I have a friend...wife...friend." She sighs. "My ex-wife."

"I'm Cheryl. You can call me Mrs. H as in Mrs. Holland. I founded this support group when my husband was in an awful boating accident."

Jane nods slowly, waiting for her continue. But the older woman with a smile so bright only grinned. "I'm sorry." She finally says.

"It's fine. He died how he lived, I must say. Anyways, I'm sorry I didn't quite catch your name,"

"Jane- it's Jane. Rizzoli."

"Well Jane," Cheryl hands her a clipboard. "Here's where you sign in. If you'll just give us an email or number or any form of contacting you, it would be a lot easier to keep in touch and make sure you're getting support throughout the rest of the week."

Jane's hands fumbles for a moment before she puts the coffee cup down on a treats table filled with cookies and more bad coffee. She balances the board in her hand before scribbling her name and personal cell phone number.

"Thank you," Cheryl takes it from her. "Have a seat, we'll be starting soon."

Jane only nods before taking a seat in the circle of fifteen chairs. There's scattered seating outside the circle and she wonders for a moment if those are for undecided newcomers.

However, since she feels entirely too desperate to not consider herself undecided, she sits in the circle and waits.

It's ten minutes before Cheryl declares the meeting has started. The chattering dies down and she's handed a foot long, colorful stick by a man in a wrinkled suit who takes his in one of the outside chairs.

She pulls her attention away from the nervous looking man when Cheryl says her name.

"We've got a new woman here." She says with a wide smile. "Jane would you like to tell us all your story?"

She looks dumbfounded as she looks across each and every face around her. They're all welcoming and a little tired but there's no pressure for her to go.

"Uh," she looks down at her coffee. "Yeah...I'll go."

"Excellent." The stick is handed from hand to hand until it reaches her. "That's the PAV talking stick. Absolutely no one is allowed to talk unless they have the stick or being spoken to by the person that has the stick."

Of course, Jane already knows about talking sticks. She had a bit of a hot temper in her marriage and her wife encouraged they use it more often.

She frowns at the memory.

"I'm uh, here, because..." she sets the cold coffee down between her feet. Her boots squeak as she moves her legs and rests her elbows on her knees. "My wife..." she waits for a reaction. Usually there is one. "I'm here because my wife...I'm sorry my soon-to-be ex-wife...doesn't remember me. She was in a coma a month ago. She woke up just two weeks ago but she, uh, lost a lot of her memory."

She doesn't really know what else to say. So she shrugs awkwardly at the rest of the group.

"How does that make you feel?" Cheryl asks across the small environmentally warm circle. She smiles encouragingly at Jane as she hugs her coffee tightly in her hands.

Jane purses her lips thoughtfully. "Which part?"

"All of it."

Jane shrugs. "I don't like it...any of it." she studies the stick in her hand for a moment and listens to the pitter patter of the rain pounding the barely stable roof, roughly. She hears the soft tapping of her nervous foot.

"Maura's a doctor. Medical Examiner, actually. We got married six months ago. We've been best friends since I was in Vice-I- I'm a cop. And she was just starting at our precinct. I guess that doesn't matter now. She doesn't remember it. See...she can remember a lot of things. Like where she went to college and that I have a dog named Jo Friday. But she doesn't remember me or the day she tried to help me out with cash because she thought I was a prostitute."

She chuckles a little and the others to do so too. She smiles a little more.

"Maura's just like that, I guess. She's helpful. We've known each other for a few years. I just got promoted to homicide three months ago and our marriage got rough when we had to work together on cases. Long nights and murders can wear a marriage down. She was going out of town to see her parents when she had her accident." Jane weighs the talking stick in her hand.

"We used these. Except ours gave me splinters so I never liked holding it. Anyways, we had a fight the night she had her accident. I wanted to release to the press a profile of the killer and she thought I was making too many assumptions. As our Chief ME she couldn't in good conscious support my decision to just leak the little information we had. I guess if it'd been anyone else telling me that I might have listened but our marriage was already on the rocks and I guess I just wanted to do it, you know...to spite her. I said some stuff I didn't mean and she was going to leave for the weekend so we could both cool off."

Jane sighs sadly and sits up in her chair. "So, I guess I really hate this situation. I mean my Ma told me in six months to a year we'd be seeking counseling because no marriage is perfect. I just assumed we'd be doing it together. She's probably seeing someone to cope with her lost memories and well I'm here because if I hadn't told my wife marrying her was the biggest mistake of my life I might still have one by now and she wouldn't be going through all of this alone."

There's an awkward silence and Jane assumes there always will be after she tells her story so she ignores it.

"I guess that's it."

A tall, disheveled man raises his hand for the stick and Jane tosses it to him. He begins telling how much progress his wife is making since last week and Jane feels a little jealous that his wife remembered him and stayed with him.

She listens to everyone's story for the rest of the night. The coffee on the floor is forgotten and the pouring rain drowns out enough of her woes for the night. She's grateful she doesn't have to deal with the guilt until she leaves the center.

* * *

Jane stops for Maura's prescription on her way home. She uses the key she said she'd lost to get into the main house. Maura's in their bedroom singing rather off key to a song she didn't think her wife even listened to.

So it takes her moment to leave the bag on the counter before going back to the guesthouse. She listens as Maura hums along to the song. She can almost see her wife sitting on their bed in her nightgown and applying an unhealthy dose of moisturizer.

When the music stops, along with Maura's singing, Jane finally leaves.

She hears the bedroom door open just as the front door closes behind her.

She goes to the guesthouse to finish packing the rest of her stuff.

* * *

**A/N**: This by far is going to be challenging for me as a writer and you as a reader. Because since it didn't go the canon way, Jane and Maura are a little more different than they are in the show. Meaning some things about Maura that we learned in season 4 (I.E. [picking locks to watch TV and being addicted to corn syrup at 19) So I'm going to have to decide which is possible and which isn't and you're going to have to be patient with me. Ok? We can do this together. Wow that was corny.


	2. and a broken love

**A/N**: I tried...let's just make that clear.

* * *

A heavy rain beats down cruelly on the streets of Boston and those unfortunate enough not to be protected by shelter. The startling downfall turns the snow outside into slush making it dangerous for the aforementioned unfortunate.

Maura watches from the sheltering comfort of her home, incognito behind the curtain of her living room's window as she takes in the sight of her street.

Mostly she can only see the path that separates her home from the guesthouse and her driveway. But she can also see three homes across the street from hers with children still playing in the snow and their concerned parents shadowing them, ready to catch them should they fall the wrong way.

She watches as Detective Rizzoli, the woman she supposedly married, pulls into her driveway, right behind her Mercedes and exits the all-black cruiser tiredly with a bandaged right hand.

The woman is soaked and muddy in a pair of jeans and an unbuttoned checkered blue and black pea coat as she slams her cruiser door and makes her way to the guesthouse across the way.

Jane, Maura remembers her name, rubs fervently – though uselessly – at the stains rapidly smearing her white crisp shirt; her frustration manifesting into quick visible huffs of breath vaporizing around her.

The woman walks wearily, not bothering to hurry out of the rain and injurious mush on the ground, with her head down and her shoulders slumped. Maura _does_ remember her few human behavior courses from college that she took simply to find an excuse _not_ to visit her parents when they moved to Boston.

And the information, unfortunately, feels fresher in her mind than it most likely had two months ago.

Something about the way Detective Rizzoli walks sullenly suggests she's more than just tired. She's haggard. Worn down. And by the way she lets out a long sigh when she slides her cellphone back into her pocket; she doesn't believe it's going to get any better.

At the letterbox adhered on Maura's home, the brunette goes through their mail. She keeps the letters intended for her tucked between her right arm and side but puts the others back. As she's going through the envelopes, her eyes flicker almost habitually to the window Maura is watching through.

The recently injured woman quickly draws the curtain back to its original place and steps out of sight of the window.

She breathes for a moment, heart pounding at almost being seen, before peeking once more. Detective Rizzoli stands with a small smile on her face and waves awkwardly at her.

"Hi Maura." Her words are perfectly sound even with five feet and a glass window between them.

"Good evening, Detective Rizzoli." She greets formally with a rigid nod. "I see you've injured your hand."

Jane glances at her bandaged hand and looks sheepish. "Yeah but it's just a sprain."

Maura draws the curtain back as she goes to open the door. She invites the Detective in by holding the door for her and motioning for her to come in.

Jane looks confused and hesitant but her recently surly demeanor improves remarkably as she passes the threshold of what used to be her home too. Immediately she's hit with the completely enveloping warmth of her wife's home.

"How did it happen?" curiosity and something else Maura can't quite begin to understand though it feels disturbingly analogous to concern as it swells within her.

She closes the door before she takes the other woman's injured hand between her own with a delicate hold that doesn't supply a painful amount of pressure.

Jane's hand is warm between her own. It feels…well it feels truly puzzling. The feeling she gets as she holds this woman's hand forms a headache between her eyes.

She understands that they were married; she's been told a nauseating amount of times but that doesn't change the fact that she doesn't remember this woman. She doesn't remember meeting her, or having their wedding, and most of all she doesn't remember being in love with her.

But by the obnoxious quantity of photos of them decorating her home, she knows she must have loved Jane because she's never seen herself look so happy.

And loved in return.

"I was taking down a perp." Jane explains, gesturing to her muddy and soaked clothes that has her standing unpleasantly in the foyer between the kitchen and the living room. "Went to question him as a witness and he slammed the door on my hand. My partner and I chased him."

Just a minor fracture, Maura suspects.

"Did you catch him?" she asks, piercing green eyes boring inquisitively into eyes the same color as coffee beans.

Jane swallows thickly at the feeling of Maura's hands around her own; consuming her and intoxicating her in ways she hasn't felt since long before the accident. Back when they were just happily dating and life couldn't get any better. "Who?" she asks dumbly.

"The perpetrator." Maura smiles blushingly, becoming uncomfortably aware of her effect on the other woman. She notices, as she looks down between them with bright red cheeks, that her thumb has been inattentively rubbing the back of Jane's hand soothingly.

She stops it instantly and Detective Rizzoli takes her hand away.

"Sorry." Maura gives her a sincerely apologetic look.

Jane simply shrugs. "We got the guy." She answers her soon-to-be ex-wife's earlier question.

Maura nods once and smiles partially proud but mostly still embarrassed. "I'm glad." She crosses her arms over her chest.

"While I'm here," Jane's eyes glance around the foyer for a moment before going back to Maura's eyes where she gets lost for a moment in the angry sea of green; Maura's green orbs capture her and drown her and it takes a few seconds before she finds her way to air and breathes again.

"I heard you were coming back to work tomorrow." She shakes her head to clear the memory of Maura's intoxicating touch from her mind.

"I am," the Medical Examiner responds professionally. "I would like to return to work. Your mother and I have-,"

"You've been hanging out with my Ma?"

"Well she's a very persistent woman. She wanted me to remember so she took me to the library and we went through the newspaper archives."

Jane motions for her to continue.

"I've done quite well as the Chief Medical Examiner and I'd like to continue my work as soon as possible. It's excruciating being left at home almost completely healed. I've accepted my memory may never be restored but _I_ must return to work.

I've been cleared medically. I'll only be able to examine bodies for a certain period of time in the autopsy. However I've been told they hired another Medical Examiner to temporarily replace me-,"

"Dr. Pike. He fucking sucks." Jane suddenly realizes her slip of the tongue and slaps her hand over her mouth. "Shit sorry. _Crap._ Sorry."

It's almost endearing the way Jane looks severely disappointed in herself. "It's okay."

Maura's looks down at the swirling liquid in her coffee mug for a moment. Either gathering herself or taking a longer look at something that isn't Jane. Even _she_ isn't quite sure.

She knows why she's drawn to this woman but it still confuses her to no end.

"I've asked for him to stay and help me for a while. Alone he may not be the best replacement which is precisely why I'm inducing my return." She finishes with an awkward silence.

"Well…" Jane doesn't think she's ready but that's not her decision and she doesn't have a right to an opinion anymore. So with a completely fake look of support she smiles at her wife.

Getting ready to go leave, Jane walks around Maura as she asks: "If you need a ride tomorrow, I'm available. You know if you can't drive yet or anything."

Maura looks grateful. But she still says, "I can."

Jane frowns. She hides her disappointment and rejection well. She's at the door now and it's open, letting in a very cold draft. "Okay. So I'll see you tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow." She's promised.


End file.
